William Kidd, or Captain Kidd, lived
from 22 January 1645 to 23 May 1701. He became one of the two or three best
known pirates to emerge from an era in which piracy was rife and he gave rise
to legends of buried treasure that still attract treasure hunters today; yet he
never set out to become a pirate, and there is every reason to believe that his
eventual trial and execution for piracy was the result of an establishment
cover-up in which crucial documents that could have led to his acquittal were
withheld by the authorities. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set
out in our Historical
Timeline.

Kidd was born into a reputable family, probably in
Greenock on the River Clyde
(although some have made competing claims for
Dundee as his birthplace). Kidd's
father died when he was five, and as soon as he was able, the young William
went to sea, serving on a wide variety of ships over the following three
decades.

Kidd first enters the record as a seaman when, at the end of the
1680s, he was elected as captain by the mutinous crew of a privateer (a ship
carrying out what amounts to piracy against one side in a conflict, under
licence from the other). He sailed his ship to St Kitts and Nevis in the
Caribbean where, to please the British colonial authorities, he renamed it
"Blessed William" after the king. He then launched
a successful campaign against French ships in the Caribbean under the authority
of the British. Kidd's crew eventually tired of him, abandoning him and sailing
away.

Kidd's efforts to catch up with the "Blessed
William" took him to New York, then a corrupt "anything goes" colony.
Kidd settled there in 1691, aged 46, and married a wealthy widow, Sarah Bradley
Cox Oort with whom he had two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah Kidd. Kidd rapidly
became a pillar of New York society with a country estate, a town house on Wall
Street, and a growing interest in the cotton and tobacco trade with Britain.

Meantime, however, the scourge of piracy and the threat it posed to
wealthy traders had been growing, especially in the Indian Ocean. The Royal
Navy of the day was in no position to police international waters. The Governor
of New York and Massachusetts, the Earl of Bellmont, therefore formed a
consortium to finance a ship that could take on the pirates. Other members of
the consortium included the then Lord Chancellor, the First Lord of the
Admiralty, the Master of the Ordnance, and a Secretary of State. Those involved
genuinely wanted piracy tackled: but they knew they also stood to gain
financially if their ship were to capture booty from pirate or French vessels.
Even King William stood to gain one tenth of the value of anything taken.

The ship chosen for the expedition was the Adventure Galley, weighing 280 tons and equipped with 34
cannons, oars, and a crew of 150 men. Kidd's original crew was hand-picked, but
shortly after setting sail from Deptford on 6 September 1696 he was stopped by
HMS Duchess, who "pressed" half of his crew into service. The replacements,
found in New York at short notice, were the dregs of the dockside taverns.

Further problems followed. Kidd antagonised the powerful East India
Company by abandoning three English vessels he was meant to be escorting into
Cape Town. His first two attacks were on vessels supposedly under English
protection. And a third of his crew died of cholera and had to be replaced in
Madagascar. Kidd's crew became increasingly mutinous as he passed up a series
of opportunities to attack rich English vessels, and during a fight he killed a
gunner called Moore by hitting him with a wooden bucket.

In 1697 the Adventure Galley made its
way into the Red Sea, attacking a number of ships unrelated to the piracy Kidd
had supposedly been sent to stamp out. Kidd's backers in England and America
became increasingly nervous about what was happening. In January 1698, however,
Kidd hit the jackpot, capturing the 300 ton Quetta
Merchant and another ship, The Maiden. Both
carried papers showing they were sailing under French authority to attack
British vessels, and so constituted legitimate targets under the remit of the
expedition. Kidd, however, breached instructions from his backers by
distributing among his crew £10,000 made by selling part of the booty. He
probably did this to avoid mutiny. By now the Adventure
Galley was barely seaworthy, and Kidd docked in Ile St Marie, an
infamous pirate den and the base of most of those he was meant to be hunting
down. This was later taken as further evidence he had turned from pirate hunter
to pirate.

Kidd headed back for New York, unaware of the controversy caused by
the voyage of the Adventure Galley. Passing through
the Caribbean in 1699 he learned that the British had announced an amnesty for
every Indian Ocean pirate except himself. Convinced of his own innocence, Kidd
wrote to the Earl of Bellmont and then arrived in New York. Meantime the tide
of public opinion had turned against privateers, and Kidd's own original
backers were under considerable pressure because of their involvement with him.
To prove his innocence, Kidd presented the Earl of Bellmont with the French
papers captured on Quetta Merchant and
The Maiden. These promptly disappeared, only being
found amongst other unrelated papers in the Public Records Office in London two
centuries later.

Without his key defence documents, Kidd's fate was probably sealed
anyway, but he further alienated public opinion by appearing to try to use part
of the booty as bribes to secure his freedom. He was taken to Britain in
February 1700. He failed to make a good impression when he appeared in front of
the House of Commons on 27 March 1701. His trial in May 1701 on two counts of
piracy and one of murder (of the gunner, William Moore) was a foregone
conclusion, and on 23 May 1701 he was hung at Wapping, his body hanging beside
the Thames for two years as a deterrent to others.

Kidd's story is a mix of farce and tragedy. The truth is more one
of a well intentioned man who overstepped the line, though probably no more so
than most privateers of his day. What made Kidd's story different was the
implications it had for people in very high places in the society of his day,
who found him to be a very convenient scapegoat when public opinion shifted.
Meanwhile, legends continue of vast hoards of treasure buried by Kidd on
various islands to protect his fortune before he returned to New York. And he
became the inspiration for Robert Louis
Stevenson's classic pirate novel Treasure
Island.